Khan Academy Embraces BitTorrent

from the nice-to-see dept

We've written a few times before about the Khan Academy, the free online education resource, started by a former housemate of mine, that has turned into a powerhouse in the online education space. I had lunch with Sal a few weeks ago, and he's got some really fascinating things planned for Khan Academy that go way beyond what's there now. If you think it's disruptive to the educational space, you haven't seen anything yet. The latest move by the organization is to team up with BitTorrent to make it even easier and more efficient to spread the educational videos. They're doing this via the BitTorrent app studio platform, which is a development worth watching. The core of BitTorrent has always been the underlying infrastructure it provides, and the company is clearly moving towards enabling others to build a lot more on top of that infrastructure. As more and more people begin to realize the power of BitTorrent as infrastructure, we should start to see a lot more interesting apps come out of it. So this collaboration seems like good news for both sides, with two companies doing very interesting and disruptive things...

The core of BitTorrent has always been the underlying infrastructure it provides

Except they don't provide infrastructure, users do. BitTorrent as a protocol only presents that methods by which people can choose to share their internet connection and bandwidth.

Sadly, Bit Torrent as a protocol is mostly used for less than legal purposes. I am sure your friends institute will reset the balance, once again turning the P2P arena into a nearly perfectly lawful way to do business.

The man trying to keep a good protocol down...

Yes. Let's continue to smear a perfectly good technology with FUD and make all of the claims about it a self-fulfilling as people are scared away from it for no good reason.

Bit Torrent is nothing more than distributed (rather than centralized) distribution mechanism. If you have no problems with your stuff being copied, the DRM and lockdown provided by websites that use Flash are of no value and possibly a hinderance.

Woah, that's awesome news. When I first heard about Bill Gates praising it, I was a little skeptical because I thought it might lead to Microsoft having a stake in it and releasing videos in proprietary Microsoft formats like they did with the previously-archived Feynman lectures in physics (in Silverlight). Now, however, I know that Bill Gates was praising it as a parent of school-age children and wasn't subtly implying a future Microsoft takeover of sorts having been the former chairman and CEO; I think it's great that the Khan Academy is embracing a technology that is too often wrongfully called illegal for various reasons. Given that the Khan Academy has gotten very good press, hopefully BitTorrent will gain a better reputation among the wider media types through this collaboration.